Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Tim Crane (Cambridge), the TLS philosophy editor, has put my original letter about the review and the reply by Stern's colleague Sebastian Gardner on-line here. I sent a follow-up letter, I'm not sure if TLS has published it, but here it is for those following the back-and-forth:

To the editors:

Sebastian Gardner’s defense (Sept. 18) of his
colleague Tom Stern’s sneering review of The Oxford Handbook of
Nietzsche makes one point with which I strongly agree, namely, that “the
possibility that we interpret texts in congenial and inspiring, but
historically inaccurate ways is perfectly genuine and especially salient in the
case of Nietzsche.” Many essays in the Oxford Handbook are
sensitive to that issue (though one would never know that from Stern’s review),
and my own work on Nietzsche has been animated by the need to recapture the
actual philosophical context in which Nietzsche wrote. Gardner
notes that more than halfway into the review, Stern does briefly praises
the clarity of the “Analytic Nietzsche” allegedly represented by the Handbook,
but only after ridiculing analytic philosophers for writing in “cold, unlovely,
jargoned prose” and “kneel[ing] before the Dread God of Consistency.”
Stern quickly returns to his real theme, reminding readers that, unlike say the
Nazi Nietzsche, the “Analytic Nietzsche “finds himself on the periphery” (a
charming comparison, but one that also says more about Stern’s ignorance of
Nietzsche’s place in contemporary philosophy), and that “the analytic Nietzsche
muffles him” and “suck[s] life from his living words.”

Only collegial loyalty can explain Gardner’s blindness to
what is obvious to other readers: Stern does not like “the Analytic
Nietzsche,” so much so it is not clear he even read the 800-page book he
putatively reviews but whose actual content he barely mentions.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

The last version was 2012, so it warrants some updating given changes in the interim (and also some of the useful comments on the last version). The recommendations are premised on three assumptions about what is needed to do good PhD work on Nietzsche: (1) a strong, general philosophical education; (2) good Nietzsche scholars to supervise the work; and (3) a philosophical environment in which one can get a solid grounding in the history of philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, Kant, and post-Kantian German philosophy.

With that in mind, here's the eight programs I'd strongly recommend for someone certain they plan to focus on Nietzsche:

Birkbeck College, University of London: a solid department overall, albeit a bit narrow (certainly top 10 in the UK), unusual in having two very substantial Nietzsche scholars on faculty, Ken Gemes and Andrew Huddleston. If one reaches out to faculty at other London colleges, one can also get the necessary historical education in other figures.

Brown University: a strong department overall (top 20 in the US), with one leading Nietzsche specialist, Bernard Reginster, and two other senior faculty with sympathetic interests in Nietzsche (Paul Guyer and Charles Larmore). Guyer and Larmore, as well as Mary Louise Gill, provide strong coverage of other important periods and figures for purposes of studying Nietzsche.

Columbia University: a very strong department overall (top 10ish in the US), with three senior faculty interested in Nietzsche: Taylor Carman, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Frederick Neuhouser. With these three, as well as Lydia Goehr and (part-time) Axel Honneth, also one of the best places in the U.S. to study the Continental traditions in philosophy. Also offers strong coverage of ancient philosophy and Kant.

New York University: the best department in the Anglophone world, now with three senior faculty with serious interests in Nietzsche: Robert Hopkins, John Richardson, and Tamsin Shaw. The department now also has strong coverage of ancient philosophy and through Richardson, Anja Jauernig and Beatrice Longuenesse, has strong coverage of Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions. Given the department's dominant strengths in other areas to date (e.g., metaphysics, philosophy of mind), so far there have been few students there working on Nietzsche or other post-Kantian figures--something a prospective student should investigate.Princeton University: a very strong department overall (top 5ish in the US), with one leading figure in Nietzsche studies, Alexander Nehamas, who has returned in recent years to working on Nietzsche and supervising students (e.g., Huddleston at Birbeck, above). Also very strong in ancient philosophy, with other faculty in Philosophy or cognate departments offering coverage of Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy (mostly 19th-century).University of California, Riverside: a solid department overall (top 30ish in the US) and one of the best places in the U.S. (perhaps the best) to study the Continental traditions in philosophy with Maudemarie Clark (a leading Nietzsche specialist), Pierre Keller, and Mark Wrathall, as well as Georgia Warnke in Political Science and a new junior faculty member in Philosophy, Andreja Novakovic,. The department is especially notable for the way in which the study of the Continental traditions is closely integrated with the study of the rest of philosophy, to the enrichment of both. (It's also a very collegial place, one of my favorite departments to visit in the country.) There is also a large and impressive group of graduate students working on the post-Kantian traditions and/or interested in Nietzsche.

University of Chicago: a strong, if somewhat idiosyncratic, department (top 20ish in the US), with particular strengths in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and in Kant and post-Kantian German and French philosophy. Chicago has to have more scholars interested in Nietzsche from more divergent points of view than anywhere else: besides me, also James Conant, Robert Pippin, David Wellbery, and (part-time still) Michael Forster. As with Riverside, there is a large group of students interested in Nietzsche (four of the six PhD students I'm currently working fairly closely with have substantial interests in Nietzsche, though most are not writing dissertations in German philosophy).University of Warwick: a solid department overall (top 10 in the UK), with two senior scholars interested in Nietzsche (Keith Ansell-Pearson, Peter Poellner) from different perspectives, and strong coverage generally of Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions (Quassim Cassam, Stephen Houlgate [who also is interested in Nietzsche], and A.D. Smith, among others).

Here are some other departments a student interested in Nietzsche should certainly consider as well:

Boston University: a solid department (top 50 in the US), with a strong commitment to the history of philosophy, including Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions. The Nietzsche scholar Paul Katsafanas was recently tenured there (though he is pushing a rather distinctive, and to my mind, implausible line about Nietzsche these days, though I still highly commend several of his earlier papers that we've discussed on this blog in the past--but students sympatico to his approach would no doubt find him an excellent person with whom to work).Oxford University: a very strong department (top 5 in the Anglophone world), with strong coverage of ancient philosophy and the history of philosophy, but only one significant Nietzsche scholar on faculty, Peter Kail. Stephen Mulhall and Joseph Schear offer good coverage of other aspects of the post-Kantian Continental traditions.Stanford University: a very strong department (top 10 in the US), with two senior faculty who have done important work on Nietzsche: Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain. In the past, I would have put Stanford in the top group, but Nadeem tells me he's not really working much on Nietzsche anymore. Also strong in ancient philosophy and, with Anderson and Michael Friedman, also very good for Kant. The department's center of gravity, judging from its PhD graduates, does appear to be more in logic, language, mind, metaphysics & epistemology.University of California, San Diego: a strong department (top 20ish in the US), with two senior faculty interested in Nietzsche (Michael Hardimon and Donald Rutherford), and extensive coverage of ancient philosophy and Kant.

University College London: a good department (top 5 in the UK), with three faculty with interests in Nietzsche: Sebastian Gardner, Mark Kalderon, and Tom Stern--though for none does it appear to be a primary interest, except perhaps Stern (though I have mixed views of his work). Gardner is also a major scholar of Kant and German Idealism.

University of Essex: a narrow department, but strongly focused on Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions. Two faculty do notable work on Nietzsche: Beatrice Han-Pile and David McNeill.

University of Southampton: another narrow department, but with a particular focus on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche--notable faculty include Christopher Janaway, David Owen, and Aaron Ridley.

For a student looking to do a terminal M.A. first, s/he might consider any of the UK departments (where students first do a master's degree or B.Phil. before doing the PhD), or, in the U.S., Georgia State University remains far and away the best choice: in addition to solid coverage of moral, political and legal philosophy, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the department has two well-known scholars who work on Nietzsche (Jessica Berry and Gregory Moore), and two other faculty who work on Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy (Sebastian Rand and Eric Wilson).

On the European Continent, the place to be for someone interested in Nietzsche now is the University of Bonn, with Michael Forster, a preeminent scholar of German philosophy of the 18th- and 19th-centuries, as well as ancient philosophy, and Mattia Riccardi, the best younger Nietzsche scholar in Europe in my experience (he also works on Kant and philosophy of mind and cognitive science). The New University of Lisbon continues to have a lively philosophical community interested in Nietzsche led by Joao Constancio.

London has long been a lively place for Nietzsche studies (with Ken Gemes and now Andrew Huddleston at Birkbeck, Sebastian Gardner and Mark Kalderon at UCL, as well as Daniel Came and Peter Kail not far away to the north, and Christopher Janaway and others not far away to the south), so it's a bit surprising that Tom Stern, who also teaches at UCL and professes a scholarly interest in Nietzsche, should have penned a rather silly "review" of The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche edited by Ken Gemes and John Richardson. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall, though you are not missing anything if you can't access it. I sent the TLS a brief letter about this sophomoric "review":

To the editors:

As one of 34 contributors to The Oxford Handbook of
Nietzsche, and one of the minority in the volume actually conversant with
what remains of “analytic” philosophy, I was astonished to learn from Tom Stern
(review, Sept. 3) that the Handbook represents “The Analytic
Nietzsche.” “Analytic philosophy is broadly ahistorical in outlook,”
Stern notes, but much of my own work has been devoted to showing how ignorance
of the intellectual history of 19th-century Germany, in particular
the rise of German materialism, has distorted readings of Nietzsche.
Other contributors examine in detail the influence of Greek philosophy and
culture, the German Romantics, and Kant and NeoKantians. Stern asserts
that Nietzsche was “heart and soul, a brilliant nineteenth-century German,” for
whom Wagner and Bismarck were very important. There are six dozen
references to Wagner in The Oxford Handbook, many extended discussions,
though fewer of Bismarck. Nietzsche himself would have stoutly
denied Stern’s cramped characterization of him, and the content of the actual
essays in the volume (which are hardly discussed) belies it rather decisively,
as does the wide resonance Nietzsche has had across time and cultures.

Stern continues: “Analytic philosophy favours clear
definition. Nietzsche once wrote that only that which has no history can be
defined.” Good philosophy, like good scholarship, generally favors
clarity in exposition, but not necessarily definitions (as Nietzsche himself
quipped: “Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those
who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity”). Nietzsche’s point
from the Genealogy that the meaning of concepts (like “punishment”)
varies across historical and cultural epochs (and thus can not be defined) has
no relevance to whether or not that claim can be clearly stated and
evaluated. Finally, Stern declares that, “analytic philosophers kneel
before the Dread God of Consistency: if you hold ‘P’ you cannot also hold
‘not-P’.” Actually, Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant,
Husserl and Habermas, among others, all accept the law of non-contradiction,
though I assume they are not “analytic” philosophers, despite their
kneeling. Indeed, it’s a bit hard to see what philosophical exposition of
Nietzsche would look like if it were as cavalier about non-contradiction as
Stern appears to be.

I have a different hypothesis about Stern’s invention of the
bogeyman of “the Analytic Nietzsche.” Anglophone Nietzsche studies has
improved dramatically in the last two decades in terms of historical
scholarship, sensitivity to textual evidence and nuance, and philosophical
sophistication. All this has been rather jarring to the lazy and
superficial readers and sophomoric enthusiasts Nietzsche’s brilliant writing
sometimes attracts. They want to cabin off serious historical and
philosophical scholarship as “analytic,” so they can ignore it. But they
have lost that philosophical battle in the Anglophone world, and are gradually
losing it on the European Continent. Nietzsche, who lauded the “art of
reading well,” would have been pleased.

The review is actually worse than this letter lets on--Stern discusses almost none of the actual content of the volume, and uses what space he has mostly for sneering and misstatements both of the topics covered by the actual essays and the particular positions defended. What an embarrassment for both TLS and UCL.

ADDENDUM (9/15): The review is here (though I can't get it to download, but others say they can). Since several of Tom Stern's colleagues (in comments below), none of whom work on Nietzsche or are familiar with the book under review, have denied that the review is at all mocking or sneering, permit me to try to explain how the review reads if you know something both about Nietzsche
and the book:

Stern
begins with a few paragraphs suggesting that one “can order whichever Nietzsche
you want” (even though some of those offered as examples were manifest
travesties of misinterpretation), and then we learn the Oxford Handbook is just
the latest in this litany, “the Analytic Nietzsche.”What’s an “Analytic Nietzsche”:well, analytic philosophers write in “cold,
unlovely, jargoned prose,” are “ahistorical,” and “kneel before the Dread God
of Consistency.”We are reminded how
unlike Nietzsche this all allegedly is—Nietzsche after all is just a brilliant
19th-century German mainly concerned with Wagner and Bismarck, plus
he contradicts himself a lot.(The last
two claims, for Nietzsche scholars, are at best contentious, at worst false.)

In
case you didn’t yet get the point how strange the Analytic Nietzsche’s approach
is, Stern reports that Nietzsche’s “analytic lieutenants” (one might have
called them scholars) “inform their readers that either Nietzsche held
such-and-such a very complicated, exegetically speculative ‘theory”’or he was
simply inconsistent. Fear of the second option is meant to compel the reader
into the awkward embrace of the first: your money or your life.”Ha, ha, these “analytic lieutenants” are so
silly.

Stern
declares the Oxford Handbook is a
“victory monument” to “the Analytic Nietzsche” (although only a minority of the
contributions are engaged with analytic philosophy, many write on historical
topics, many in fact deal with Wagner, one of the two editors is best-known for
offering a brilliant defense of Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s famous reading of
Nietzsche, etc.).Stern then shifts gear
to discuss another book for several paragraphs, until finally, he allows (well
past the midway point of the review, and after the preceding mockery) that “to
call the analytic Nietzsche a mode of interpretation is not to deny its
considerable virtues….It wins, hands down, on clarity of expression and
conceptual complexity.”He then quotes
something suitably obscure from the bad book by Sloterdijk by way of contrast,
and declares:“the Handbook is an
excellent collection, for Nietzsche scholars working in this tradition,” i.e.,
the “Analytic Nietzsche” tradition that, until now, most of the review had been
poking fun at. The implication, as I
note in my letter to the TLS, is that everyone else can just ignore it.

After
a few lines of generic praise for unnamed articles (almost none of the content
of the book, remarkably, is actually discussed), Stern return to his attack on
“the Analytic Nietzsche,” to “what is left out, what is magnified and what,
occasionally, gets distorted.”One essay
(I’m not sure which one, actually) that attempts to understand Nietzsche’s
views on truth is mocked for allegedly “simply rid[ding] itself of” a
“troublesome sentence.”(Many Nietzsche
scholars take the view that his Nachlass material is misleading, and I suspect
that’s what is really at issue here.)

We
conclude where we left off, with ridicule:“Unlike many previous Nietzsche incarnations,s” the Analytic Nietzsche
“finds himself on the periphery,” unlike, say, the Nazi Nietzsche.(That’s a charming comparison, but one that
also reflects Stern’s ignorance of the many surprising
places Nietzsche is turning up in Anglophone philosophy [e.g., recent work by Knobe, Prinz], beyond the two or
three authors he seems to be familiar with.)Indeed, Stern reminds us, Williams thought “that Nietzsche was not a
source of philosophical theories,” so yet another reason for “doubt” about the
Analytic Nietzsche.And, let’s not
forget the apparently just charge (Stern does not rebut it) that “the analytic
Nietzsche muffles him or suck the life from his living words.”

Very
"entertaining", sure, but also unfair and belittling toward the Handbook and its contributors and to
philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

The proofs have been fully corrected (twice), and the new index delivered (thanks to excellent work by Daniel Telech, one of the wonderful PhD students here). I hope the 2nd edition will be available in October or November.

Up next: some comments on an interesting paper by Andrew Huddleston (Birkbeck) in BJHP.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Monday, May 12, 2014

Several years ago, prompted by a review by Paul Loeb, I took a look at Dirk Johnson's book Nietzsche's Anti-Darwinism (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Johnson is a Germanic studies scholar at Hampden-Sydney College, and the book is generally quite disappointing from a philosophical point of view. In any case, I never got around to writing up my thoughts about the book, but prompted by a recall notice from the library for the book, I went back to it in the last couple of days, and thought I would try to set out my reservations, before returning it, in the hope of sparing some readers from wasting their time with a book that really should not have been published.

It's been almost a quarter-century since Nietzsche studies entered its philosophical maturity with Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, and yet here we have a book published in 2010 declaring that,

For
Nietzsche, ‘truth’ was merely a perspective and an exclusive aim to truth
revealed in an inherently unstable will. (85)

If this were a once-off bit of carelessness, it could be forgiven, but it is a pervasive feature of the book which was obviously not refereed by anyone knowledgeable about philosophy or the philosophical secondary literature. I won't belabor examples of this kind, but they do make the book an annoying read for philosophers.

Johnson thinks his book is an argument against "naturalistic" readings of Nietzsche. Yet he is, to his credit, self-conscious about how bizarre such a claim is:

Does not Nietzsche's style of argumentation, his use of biological tropes and metaphors, and many of his central positions in the text prove that he was a naturalist through and through? These are serious objections, to which I will need to respond....Nietzsche adopted the discourse of both the naturalists and the Darwinists, because it was the only means to subvert their framework and to challenge their mounting success. (8)

There is no evidence in the book for the odd claim that the only way to reject naturalism was to act and argue like a naturalist. Perhaps an "internal critique" of naturalism could be mounted, but Johnson's claim is not, in the end, that Nietzsche's critique is an internal one (i.e., arguing that naturalism is self-refuting). To the contrary, Johnson ends up claiming that Nietzsche attacks naturalism from an entirely external, evaluative perspective (summarized at p. 212). According to Johnson,

Nietzsche's entire philosophy hinges on the value he places on the Dionysian--with its tragic awareness and affirmation of the eternal return....Certainly, Nietzsche recognized the explanatory power and suggestive force of the Darwinian worldview--but also the need to transcend it.... (p. 78)

Of course, this is related to a point I made in NOM early on (see esp. 26-28), and I've recently taken up an attempt to understand the "Dionysian" element in Nietzsche. None of this, however, shows that Nietzsche is not a naturalist: as a critic of morality and religion, and as a diagnostician of individuals and philosophers, he operates as a methodological naturalist in the way I described in the 2002 book. Because Nietzsche doesn't think the domain of value is a cognitive one, and because he cares very much about questions of value, necessarily (as I argued years ago) he is not a naturalist in this domain, and he, of course, famously diagnoses the failure of modern science to question its own commitment to the overriding value of knowledge (see NOM at 264 ff. for a discussion).

Johnson, alas, doesn't understand any of this. He seems to have two main targets, primarily John Richardson's reading in Nietzsche's New Darwinism (2004), and, secondarily, my argument in NOM that Nietzsche is a philosophical naturalist. Richardson is an apt target (since Richardson really does try to make Darwin central to his reconstruction of Nietzsche's work), though his arguments against Richardson are generally weak. But Johnson's general ignorance of the history and philosophy of science can only explain his taking my reading as a target as well. Johnson writes:

Leiter's linkage of the empirical sciences with "naturalism" (as exemplfied by Darwin's theories) is precisely the understanding of "naturalism" that this study will question. (8, n. 14).

Alas, NOM:3, which Johnson cites, does not link the sciences with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, indeed, nothing in my book does. That is because, unlike Richardson, I do not think there is very good evidence that Nietzsche thought of a naturalistic worldview as a Darwinian one. The German Materialists were not Darwinians, and Nietzsche's main concern against those naturalists was to vindicate the role of psychological (causal) explanation of human phenomena against their mix of physicalist reductionism or eliminativism. Indeed, even Johnson has to acknowledge that Darwin "continued to receive scant treatment" in Niezsche's corpus (26). Notwithstanding that, Johnson ascribes Nietzsche's naturalism (allegedly only of his "middle period") to "Darwin's scientific materialism" (33).

Even putting that to one side, the problem remains that he consistently confuses an attack on the value of truth and knowledge with an attack on science and naturalism: so, e.g., he notices that Nietzsche is critical of the ascetic impulse underlying the modern scientific imperative to pursue truth at any cost (as I discuss at some length in NOM, as noted above), but nowhere seems to recognize that this is a dispute about the value of truth and knowledge, not about how one acquires truth and knowledge (namely, naturalistically). Against my extended discussion in NOM in defense of the claim that Nietzsche "endorses a scientific perspective as the correct and true one" (NOM: 21), and Clark's 1990 defense of a related view, Johnson responds, in a footnote, that "my study will show that...the modern scientific enterprise becomes one of Nietzsche's most significant polemical targets in the final period" (10 n. 10). All he actually shows--sophomoric confusions about truth and knowledge to one side--is what Clark and I acknowledge, namely, that Nietzsche repudiates overestimating the value of these epistemic achievements, not that he denies they are actual epistemic achievements.

There is much else that is wrong and misleading in this book. Johnson thinks Paul Ree is "the German Darwinian" (88), even though, as Maudemarie Clark has argued for years, Nietzsche's critique of Ree is precisely a Darwinian one, i.e., that Ree wrongly infers origins from current function. Johnson thinks Nietzsche was engaged in a decade-long "philosophical investigation into the moral suppositions behind the biological discourse of his time" (203), mainly based on his confusions about Nietzsche critical commentary on egoism and altruism. But in the concluding chapter, Johnson makes clear that he thinks his monograph contributes to a debate beyond how to read Nietzsche. There is, Johnson claims,

a stubborn skepticism that Nietzsche's philosophy could with any degree of credibility call into question modern science, particularly Darwinism. The implication is that a post-Darwinian philosophy cannot hope to compete with teh uncontestable truths of modern science but must to some degree work as the handmaiden of science. The current divide in contemporary philosophy reflects this dilemma: while analytic philosophy disregards any efforts at philosophical speculation that diverge from the principles and methods of scientific induction, Continental philosophers argue for the possibility of philosophical "truth" that can liberate itself from scientific expectations and methodology.... (205-206)

Like most scholarly tourists, Johnson is apparently unaware that anything happened in "analytic" philosophy since logical positivism and Quine; so, too, he thinks there is something called "Continental philosophy." There is a sensible point to be made here--one I made in the 2002 book and, more recently, in "The Truth is Terrible" paper--namely, that Nietzsche thinks pursuit of the truth is not compatible with life-affirmation, but this point is not captured by putting the word truth in quotes, as though that somehow designates another kind of "truth."

There is an interesting puzzle about Nietzsche's naturalism and his attack on the ascetic ideal that I discuss near the end of NOM (279-283), and one often suspects that Johnson's confusion about this issue animates a lot of his book. The puzzle is that it looks like Nietzsche's polemic against the ascetic ideal is also a polemic against his own naturalism. The crucial point, however, to remember, as I note, is "that what makes the will to truth hostile to life is when the truths it uncovers are, in fact, dangerous to life" (280). But Nietzsche thinks the truths about morality he uncovers "are, in fact, advantageous for life, since, of course, he equates 'life' in this regard with the flourishing of the highest human beings" (280--this is argued in NOM at 125-126). In addition, one has to remember that Nietzsche "does not call...for us to abandon science--'there being so much useful work to be done' here (GM III:23)--but rather for science to be informed by a different, non-ascetic ideal" (282-283). Thus, as I conclude:

We have emphasized since the very first chapter that Nietzsche's naturalistic approach is merely an instrument in the service of the revaluation of values, i.e., the revaluation of the "ascetic" values that have come to predominate as morality. By lookoing at our ascetic morality as just another natural phenomenon, Nietzsche removes it from the realm of divine commandment or the eternal, unchanging order of things; he shows morality to be another phenomenon of nature, with a history and particular causes. Naturalization for Nietzsche is fundamentally non-ascetic, because it is ultimately in the service of an anti-ascetic end: to free nascent higher human beings from their false consciousness about [morality] (itself an expression of asceticism), and thus permit them to flourish. (283)

Unfortunately, Johnson, although occasionally citing my book, appears not to have gotten this far. If he had, he might have realized that his book was based on a non-sequitur: that Nietzsche thinks there are things more important than knowledge of the truth, does not mean he doesn't think that knowledge of the truths there are is to be had naturalistically.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

I only just discovered that Blogger was not sending me new comments, including on the last post, so a bunch have now appeared. Off-topic comments will not appear, of course, and comments with names attached are always more likely to appear. Unfortunately, there continues to be a lot of spam, but that should not appear either.

About Me

Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, & Human Values at the University of Chicago. He works on a variety of topics in moral, political, and legal philosophy. His current Nietzsche-related work concerns Nietzsche's theory of agency and its intersection with recent work in empirical psychology; Nietzsche's arguments for moral skepticism; and the role of naturalism in Nietzsche's philosophy.